Gab

[intransitive verb] — to talk in a rapid or thoughtless manner

Programming systems, not systems programming.

Gab is a small, dynamic language built for writing concurrent systems. Gab gives you the minimal set of abstractions that actually matter, and gets out of your way.

Simple.

Gab has one mechanism for control flow: sending messages. No if. No for. No while. No special forms to memorise.

welcome = ['Hello', ' ', 'world!']
welcome.join.println
# => Hello world!

This isn’t a constraint to work around, it’s a feature of the language. When everything is a message send, there’s nothing hidden in the language. Behaviour you don’t understand is behaviour you haven’t read yet.

Concurrent.

Gab’s runtime supports hundreds of thousands of concurrent fibers. Fibers are lightweight and far cheaper than OS threads. They communicate between each other exclusively through channels.

print_chan = Channels.make

Ranges.make(0, 10000).each i => do
  Fibers.make () => do
    print_chan <! 'Hello from fiber $!'.sprintf(i)
  end
end

print_chan.each (msg) => msg.println

Because all values in Gab are immutable, passing data between fibers requires no copying. A large record sent across a channel costs the same as sending an integer.

Immutable.

Every value in Gab is immutable. You never update a value in place, you produce a new one.

bob   = { name: 'bob',   age: 44 }
alice = bob.put(name: 'alice')

bob    # => { name: 'bob',   age: 44 }
alice  # => { name: 'alice', age: 44 }

For concurrent code, immutability isn’t a trade-off — it’s the only sensible default. Share anything, anywhere, safely.

Ship anywhere.

Build a standalone executable for any supported platform — from any other:

gab build -p aarch64-macos-none -m my,deps my_project
# => my_project  (runs on Apple Silicon, no Gab installation required)

gab build -p x86_64-linux-gnu -m my,deps my_project
# => my_project  (runs on Linux x86_64, no Gab installation required)

The output is a single file containing your code, your dependencies, and the entire Gab runtime. Send it to a server, bundle it in a container, hand it to a colleague — it just runs.

Embeddable.

Gab is designed to live inside larger applications. A stable C API (gab.h) and a static library (libcgab.a) are provided with every release. Call Gab from C, expose C functions to Gab, or write native modules.

If Lua is your current scripting layer, Gab is a direct, concurrent-ready alternative.